1. Field
Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication systems, and more particularly, to apparatus and methods of searching for radio access technologies.
2. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, broadcasts, and so on. Such networks, which are usually multiple access networks, support communications for multiple users by sharing the available network resources. One example of such a network is the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The UTRAN is the radio access network (RAN) defined as a part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a third generation (3G) mobile phone technology supported by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The UMTS, which is the successor to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technologies, currently supports various air interface standards, such as Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), Time Division-Code Division Multiple Access (TD-CDMA), and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA). For example, China is pursuing TD-SCDMA as the underlying air interface in the UTRAN architecture with its existing GSM infrastructure as the core network. The UMTS also supports enhanced 3G data communications protocols, such as High Speed Downlink Packet Data (HSDPA), which provides higher data transfer speeds and capacity to associated UMTS networks.
As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, research and development continue to advance the UMTS technologies not only to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband access, but to advance and enhance the user experience with mobile communications.
For example, one problem relates to finding an alternate radio access technology, such as when a handover or reselection is desired. Often the timing of a base station (or node B, eNodeB, etc.) is not known. As such, a user equipment may need to perform a full system acquisition search based on many different hypotheses, which may be time consuming To reduce latency, some system acquisition searches include less than a full search. In any system acquisition search, though, there is a tradeoff between missed detections and false alarms.
Thus, improvements in system acquisition searching are desired.